AND/OR/NOT

Think about it: search engines crawl thousands, maybe even millions and billions, of pages or records trying to match your search term with results. You're going to be absolutely overwhelmed with results if you only enter a single search term. You're also going to find a lot of completely irrelevant stuff.

So how can you improve your chances?

Come up with multiple search terms and combine them using the options described here.

Combining search terms with AND will:

Reduce the number of results

Make the search focus more specifically on your topic

Search for "college student" =1.2 billion results

Search for politics = 296 million results

Search for "college student" AND politics = 43 million results more focused on your topic

Search for "college student" AND politics AND "2008 election"= 543,000 more relevant results

Combining search terms with OR will:

Expand your search and increase number of results

Give your search flexibility to find alternate terms

Search for film = 601,786 results

Search for movie = 199,781 results

Search for film OR movie = 642,906 results that mention either film or movie, or both

However, search engines do NOT understand phrases, sentences, or questions. So when it does this matching, it searches for each term indivdiually. Some searches attempt to find terms in proximity to each other, but this varies depending on where you search.

If your search terms are more than single worlds, employ quotation marks to show the search engine that you want the terms to be found together. The search will look for exactly what you place in the quotation marks, so be sure there are no mistakes.

Search for Adam Smith = 38,700,000 results

Search for "Adam Smith" = 2,730,000 results

Search for theory of relativity = 3,430,000 results

Search for "theory of relativity" = 856,000 results

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Scholarship as Conversation

When You Have Already Identified a Good Source

It looks into the sources that your author referenced. This means the sources have already been vetted by your author for credibility, and you know that they are related to the topic at hand. However, it also means that the sources must have been published before your original source, so you will be retrieving older materials.

Trying to track down an article? Journals A-Z will show you whether we own the journal, what years we have access to, and give you links into the databases that provide full-text. Search by journal title.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.